I wanted to have a thread to cheer for some of the Japanese Juniors without having to make individual threads. Obviously they might eventually earn their own thread, but for the moment we can collectively follow their results here.

At the moment, there are 7 girls ranked in the top 100 in the ITF Junior Rankings:

Pretty tough matches, the only girl I realistically see winning her first round is Eri Hozumi, who is coached by Ai Sugiyama's mom! Miho might have a small chance, but McPhillips has had some promising results on the WTA tour.

Elsewhere, Akiko Omae (#71) is playing the quallies of the 25k ITF event in Noto this week. Last week, she successfully qualified for 25k Noto with two impressive wins over Ai Yamamoto and Erika Takao. Omae seems to be making some good progress towards the senior tour. Last year, she defeated former top 100 player Meng Yuan in Gifu.

I'm going to try and update who the top 15 ranked juniors are at the 1st of each month, I think it will be interesting to see how these girls develop. There is a lot of depth at the moment, and several standout 1995 and 1996 prospects that seem really good. Hopefully some of the girls will try playing some pro tournaments this year.

Also, here is a great video of Miho upsetting Monica Puig at the Osaka GA tournament last fall. I love her game She's had some tough luck at the clay tournaments in South America the last few weeks but its understandable.